industrial agriculture

Pig Farming Matters
FarmPlate Jun 13, 2012 industrial agriculture 0 comments
By Nicolette Hahn Niman  Note: This post originally appeared on www.cookingupastory.com. Read the entire post here. At a recent conference in Houston, I met the co-authors of the runaway best-seller Freakonomics. When I introduced myself, they exclaimed, “Oh! You’re the Pig Lady!” “Um, well, yes. I suppose so,” I replied with some reluctance. It was by accident that I became an expert in all things pig. In 2000, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. hired me as senior attorney for his New York-based environmental group, Waterkeeper Alliance. Shortly after I started the job, Kennedy asked me to launch a national campaign to reform the hog industry. Until then, I had never considered the way America...
More Politics of the Plate: Avoiding the “Commodity Trap” of Industrial Agriculture
Jeff Gangemi Dec 07, 2011 industrial agriculture 0 comments
This is part two of our conversation with Barry Estabrook, food journalist and author of Tomatoland. In yesterday’s post, Barry discussed how transparency can help remedy some of the modern-day farm labor abuses. He also named some of the great local producers in and around his home state of Vermont.   Today, Estabrook shares some of the small, local producers that are going against the grain of large-scale industrial agriculture, particularly in the Central Valley of California.  “I talked with a famous organic farmer, and he went on about how good we have it in Vermont — how easy the food movement in Vermont is,” says Estabrook.  “He was comparing it to the Central Valley...